Sound and color shape Greenwich artist’s aural aspirations

By Christina Hennessy

Published
12:00 am EDT, Saturday, June 25, 2016

"Molecules of Music," an ink, acrylic, enamel on clay board, in 2014, has served as an inspiration for Ellen Hackl Fagan's Reverse Sound Color Organ. She will take photos of the image and use them to become color blocks for her color/sound compositions. less

"Molecules of Music," an ink, acrylic, enamel on clay board, in 2014, has served as an inspiration for Ellen Hackl Fagan's Reverse Sound Color Organ. She will take photos of the image and use them to become ... more

Photo: Ellen Hackl Fagan / Contributed Photo

Photo: Ellen Hackl Fagan / Contributed Photo

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"Molecules of Music," an ink, acrylic, enamel on clay board, in 2014, has served as an inspiration for Ellen Hackl Fagan's Reverse Sound Color Organ. She will take photos of the image and use them to become color blocks for her color/sound compositions. less

"Molecules of Music," an ink, acrylic, enamel on clay board, in 2014, has served as an inspiration for Ellen Hackl Fagan's Reverse Sound Color Organ. She will take photos of the image and use them to become ... more

Photo: Ellen Hackl Fagan / Contributed Photo

Sound and color shape Greenwich artist’s aural aspirations

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Ellen Hackl Fagan moves her phone to about an inch from my left eye. She lines up the camera lens and takes a quick snap, capturing all of the complex patterns of my particular blue iris, along with the lid that protects it.

She sets about to transform the photo into a square of amalgamated color with a few taps of her fingertip. The hoped-for blue comes out largely tan, but it is no matter. She can still play with it on her Reverse Color Organ, something she calls a synaesthetic, or sensory blending toy, which she has developed over the past 13 years. Fagan, who is a multidisciplinary artist, not only concerns herself with how people view her work, but how they hear it.

For more than 30 years, she has attempted to visualize sound through color, largely through her abstract paintings.

“My visual sense is closely tied to my ears,” the Greenwich resident says on a recent morning. “Even when I compose an exhibition in the gallery (she owns Odetta Gallery in Brooklyn, N.Y.), the artwork is not finished until it is a song and works are actually speaking and calling to each other across the room. As a painter, I choose colors because they call out to me.”

The Reverse Color Organ (reversecolororgan.com) is a website that launched in April at the gallery, and is a soon-to-be web-based app. Fagan, who created the latest version with cognitive scientist Michael Cole and programmer Joshie Fishbein, hopes to get more people expressing themselves in the language of color. The practice of it is fairly easy. One chooses from a palette of color boxes from their screen, or accesses ones made from pictures, and teams each color block with one of about 16 tones that can be heard with each tap of a square.

Each combination becomes a kind of note that is submitted to the web for the worldwide use. Those notes, both those in personal profile and the community palette, can be combined to create unique compositions for their makers, who store and save them on their Reverse Color Organ account — at this point, they can be shared with others by Facebook, email or social media.

Fagan’s hope is that it will allow people from around the world, collectively, to advance the language of color. She captures some basic information with every new account, including where people live. Do people hear color differently depending on where they are? “Does a person in Asia have a different palette for reds than someone in the Arctic? I doubt it, but I am willing to do the research.”

But why stop at simple color boxes? “When you look at it, you can go deep into my life history as an exploration of color averaging (transforming photos to a block of color) and linking sound,” she says, as she scrolls through her photo library.

“See, here’s ‘Dog Walkin,’” she says of a composition she made from photos of her walk with her dog, Odetta. “Here she is,” pointing to a black square, “you can see lots of her blue highlights.”

Fagan starts tapping other color squares, all with their individual twang. “There’s the moss and the violet and the ferns … dogwood blossom, gravel road, all these different things. They are all there in her palette.”

Her experience is not a story retold, but remembered in color and sound that equally evoke memories and senses.

As an artist, she is relishing an opportunity to take the data mined from the app and focus on color theory study and see how patterns in colors are matched with musical notes. She’s been doing this since developing the ColorSoundGrammer Game, a precursor to the Reverse Color Organ. The data of those color/sound combinations often inspired paintings. She even has a Reverse Color Organ composition that she made of the color that started all this investigation: “Seeking the Sound of Cobalt Blue.” With the Reverse Color Organ she can see how others might hear cobalt. “I can quickly average out the sounds and say theoretically, this is how mass society hears cobalt blue.”

This all might seem a bit abstract and esoteric, but Fagan said long before words, humans were guided by the senses, a skill indigenous societies still employ. Color carried with it a knowledge. “It is a sensate way of walking the earth and getting information, whether from color, sound and smell. The senses are not separated.”

About 630 people have visited the site and created a pairing. In March, she will bring the Reverse Color Organ app to the New York Public Library, where people can take photos of themselves and turn them into color boxes and create the color/sound pairings.